


Moving Morning

by WildwingSuz



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-11
Updated: 2016-08-11
Packaged: 2018-08-08 04:34:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7743580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildwingSuz/pseuds/WildwingSuz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can try to fight changes in life, but memories never die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moving Morning

 

 ****Moving Morning  
  
Rated G

by Suzanne L. Feld  
with Katherine X. Rylien

 

It was a morning much like any other for Mary Agnes McClellan, and yet at the same time she was aware from the moment she opened her eyes that it was the last morning she would wake up and see the water sprites on her living room wall.   This was the morning of the last day she would spend in the house where she'd lived for the past fifty-three years, the house where she had raised her children and mourned her husband, the house where she'd spent nearly all of her adult life.

Her bones ached deep inside, as they did most mornings.   As she put her teeth in, they seemed to hurt a little more than usual.   Little Beth had insisted she get new dentures just a few months back and when the dentist had refit her for them, Mary Agnes swore they were just too tight.  But he insisted on doing them right--and he was a sweet, sweet boy!--and so her mouth was going through the pressure pains and soreness all over again.  She barely remembered the first time; it was nearly thirty years ago she'd had all her teeth removed at one fell swoop (bad teeth ran in the Deschenes side of her family) and dentures replaced them.  Unfortunately it made her feel no younger to have nice new clean teeth or a sore mouth.

Breakfast was, as always, half a grapefruit, a cup of black coffee, and this morning she splurged by adding a piece of rye toast with marmalade and margarine.  She could remember so long ago when margarine was a wartime miracle and such a pale white that yellow food coloring had to be added to it.  Sometimes it seemed like just yesterday, the threat of the Japs taking their freedom, but not this morning.  Oh no, _this_ morning it seemed as long ago as it really had been.

She looked around the kitchen as she ate, her mind traveling back far easier than the crazy time-travel machines in those loony science fiction movies Denny used to like to watch.  Was it in 'fifty, or 'fifty-one, that they had replaced the worn old linoleum with tile?  And that tile with this no-wax stuff, lined reddish-brown squares that barely looked like the brick it was supposed to portray.  At one time these long wooden cabinets had been metal, but those had been too heavy and torn down long ago to be replaced with something lighter and "more modern", as her youngest had put it.  The nice new range had been added sometime in the 'seventies, the tall refrigerator replacing the icebox (how the burping motor on top of that thing had driven her insane for years!) long before that. 

She turned her creaky old neck to look the other way.  Beyond the fluttery blue and yellow curtains that Little Beth had given her for Christmas many years ago, beyond the heavy black bars that were now necessary, the neighbor's yard cried out to her.  For a long time she had taken deep pride in keeping her house neat and nice, but it was no longer necessary, nor was she able to get around like she used to.  Trying to get down stairs with a walker would test the balance and patience of a person much, much younger than she.

Back when Little Beth and Denny were in high school, there had been rosebushes and one huge lilac bush just outside this window, filling the house with their sweet smells for the entire summer.  Now the window was closed though it was early June, for she could no longer take the stench of rotting dog mess from the yard next door.  Ah, but those days had been nice, she sighed as she got up for her second cup of joe.  Back when Detroit had been a boomtown, rich and lively with the lifeblood of hearty working people, before the drugs and crazies had moved in.

Yet she didn't blame it on all the black folks in general like many of her contemporaries.  It wasn't the black people that moved out and gave up, abandoned the city that had made many people rich.  No, it was trashy, careless people in general and they came in all sizes, shapes, and colors; in her long years Mary Agnes had learned that lesson well.  Now it was the black people who were revitalizing the city, bringing it back, and she was sad that she wouldn't be here to see it.

She stood carefully and tottered into the living room so that she could say good-bye in private before Little Beth and Denny came to move her to the new place.   They'd taken her to see it and she had to admit that it was well-kept and new, not a dumping ground for older folks like she read about in the papers.   Her children cared about her and were doing what they thought was best, and she no longer had the strength to fight them.   She supposed she was lucky to have them to take care of her, not like some people her own age who had no children or whose children neglected them.   Perhaps they were even right, and she could no longer live by herself.   But they didn't understand about some of the things she would miss; she could tell by the way they shook their heads at the decay the neighborhood had fallen into, the bright smile as Little Beth talked about the advantages of the retirement home.   They didn't understand what she would be leaving behind.

She lowered herself slowly onto the threadbare couch, and sat to watch the naiads one last time.   She couldn't explain about them to Little Beth, although her daughter had understood when she was a child.   Perhaps they were only for the very old and the very young.   Those in-between were to busy with their lives to have time for such things.   She didn't allow herself to see the boxes already piled and ready to move beside the couch, just as she sometimes refused to recognize the disrepair her house had fallen into, preferring to remember it as it had been when her beloved husband was still at her side. 

A bright point of rainbow-hued light moved slowly across the faded wallpaper, and for the moment Mary Agnes was content.   She knew it was the result of sunlight diffusing as it passed through the leaded glass window, but she liked her mother's explanation better.   Remembering, she felt a pang of loss, surprisingly sharp considering that her mother had passed away better than twenty years ago.  

Those same shards of prism-light had existed in her mother's kitchen, and when the long-ago child who had once been Mary Agnes Bowman had asked what they were, she'd been told:  "Those are naiads, water sprites come to visit us.   They are pixies that live in streams and ponds.   See, you can hold one if you are patient and gentle."   And her mother had taken her tiny hand and held it so that the naiad had seemed to dance across her palm.

She had gazed at it awhile, full of wonder.   After a time it moved away, or perhaps her small arm grew tired, and she had asked: "But Mama, if they are water pixies, how can they come inside the house?"

"The special glass allows them to come and play with lucky little girls and boys.   It's clear and strong, like water, or like ice I suppose."

Many years later, Mary Agnes had told the same story to Little Beth and Denny, but she didn't suppose they remembered.    She watched the naiads move slowly across the wall as the sun rose, until finally she was summoned by the door buzzer.   She grimaced as she stood, for once not eager to see her children.   Well, at least they'd restrained their eagerness to force her from her home until a decent hour, so that she'd had a little time to herself on this last morning.

"Ma, how are we today?"  Little Beth greeted her at the door.   Mary Agnes supposed it was a bit senile of her to go on calling this hefty fifty-year-old woman "little" Beth, but she had always been the baby of the family.   "How are you feeling?  Up to moving?"

"Never ready to leave my house", she grumbled, turning away from the door as her youngest stepped inside.   "But you'll do what you got to do, I suppose, never mind what I want."

Little Beth sighed.   "Ma, we've discussed this.  .  .  look.   I brought you a present.   I was going to wait until we got to the new place, but--here.   I'm sorry, I didn't have time to wrap it."

Mary Agnes took the box from her daughter and opened it.   Inside, glittering, was what looked like a pile of broken glass.   Whatever Beth had bought her, it had not survived the car trip, and her mouth made a silent O of sorrow--but no, Little Beth was lifting the shards up to the light, perhaps not trusting her mother's aged and shaking hands.   A wind chime, consisting of a spiral of glass pieces ranging from a couple of inches to half a foot in length.   And as the light passed through them, a dozen naiads cavorted on the wall and on Little Beth's face and her dress, livelier than Mary Agnes had ever seen them before.   She turned away so that her daughter would not see the tears in her eyes and misunderstand.   She didn't want Little Beth to think she was crying out of anger or frustration the way she'd done when they'd told her she would have to move.   Because it wasn't that at all.   She could take the naiads with her.   Realizing that, she suddenly felt that her own mother was not truly gone.   She lived on in some sense because Beth had remembered about the naiads, and because Mary Agnes could still remember the feel of the large, strong  hand holding her own much smaller one, just as she could recall the weight of five-year-old Little Bethie on her lap.   These things were not lost to her, not so long as they were kept alive by love and memory. 

 

_finis_

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I recently found this story tucked away on my hard drive. It was originally written in 1994 as the ending of my novel "Naiads", which never got published. I co-wrote it with a now-ex-friend who I haven't seen or talked to in at least fifteen years after a vicious betrayal, but I am crediting her since I'm not that big of an asshole. I still resent what she did to me, but credit where credit is due since the story wouldn't be the same without her input.


End file.
